Earn AdSense revenue with your customized Google search engine

By Jenstar on October 23, 2006, 10:31 pm

I have been hearing rumors of an AdSense enabled customized search engine from Google for some time now, and it has finally launched. It is a beta coming out of Google Co-op. It allows you to create your own customized search results, meaning you can pick and choose the sites that show up in the results.

How does the customized search engine work?

Simply submit websites or pages you’d like to include in your search engine index. You can choose either to restrict your search results to include only these pages and sites, or simply to give these pages and sites higher priority and ranking in the larger Google index. Once you’ve defined your search engine index, Google will give you a simple piece of code for a search box to place on your site or blog. You’ll then have the option to choose various customization options to make the look and feel and functionality of your search engine your own.

You can also add sites to your customized search engine as you surf, and you can allow friends to add to it as well.

And how can you make money with your customized search engine? If you have an AdSense account, you need to verify it within your search engine control panel (click the “make money” tab) by adding the email address that you use with your AdSense account, your zip code, and the last 5 digits of your phone number.

The search results display similar to AdSense for Search results, and the ads are clearly marked with “Ads by Google”.

That was easy enough to set-up, thanks for the tips. I’ve set up a customized search engine all about Spain and Spanish for my readers. Not sure how the revenue information is supposed to appear in my adsense account though, whether it appears as another channel or a seperate section. I guess I’ll know in a couple of days!!

Do you know if you’re allowed to place just a search box on a page? Or does the site has to have some content, like in the case of the regular Adsense for Search box? You’re the terms of service expert, so I thought you might know

I see a lot more to this. Sure it is a a great new product and you bet I am going to do a LOT with it. The bigger issue to me is Yahoo’s utter failure to take this step WAY BACK in August when they released Yahoo Search builder. I just posted an article to my blog called, “Google Punches Yahoo in the Face”

True words, and if you really get into Google Custom Search and set it up really well the results can be amazing because the ECPM is typically very high, like I generally see an ECPM of around $180…. thats not $180 a click, but the click through’s can add a dollar or two to your daily earnings… and people DO use the search because it is useful for them, especially site search.